🔍 LLM DAILY

Your Daily Briefing on Large Language Models

November 28, 2025

HIGHLIGHTS

• 49 U.S.-based AI startups have secured funding rounds of $100 million or more in 2025, showcasing the continued strong investment momentum in the AI sector following 2024's record-breaking year.

• Elon Musk's xAI is developing an 88-acre solar farm for its Colossus data center in Memphis, addressing growing concerns about AI's energy consumption by generating approximately 10% of the facility's power needs.

• Asus and Nvidia are developing an unprecedented high-performance AI desktop workstation featuring 784GB of "Coherent" memory and 20 PFLOPS of AI performance, bringing data center-level capabilities to desktop form factors.

• A comprehensive study from the University of Tübingen presents the first large-scale systematic evaluation of model merging techniques for LLMs, demonstrating that merging can lead to emergent capabilities and sometimes outperform parent models.

• Google's open-source Gemini CLI has garnered over 84,900 GitHub stars, establishing itself as a standard tool for bringing advanced AI capabilities directly to the terminal with comprehensive monitoring features.

BUSINESS

Funding & Investment

• 2025 U.S. AI Funding Milestone: 49 U.S.-based AI startups have raised rounds of $100 million or more in 2025, according to a TechCrunch analysis. The report examines how 2025's AI funding landscape compares to the "monumental" year for the industry in 2024. TechCrunch (2025-11-26)

Company Updates

• xAI Building Solar Farm: Elon Musk's xAI is developing a solar farm adjacent to its Colossus data center in Memphis. The 88-acre project is expected to generate approximately 30 megawatts of electricity, which would cover about 10% of the data center's estimated power consumption. TechCrunch (2025-11-26)

• Warner Music Group Settles with Suno: Warner Music has signed a partnership with AI music startup Suno, resolving their previous lawsuit. The agreement ensures artists and songwriters maintain full control over how their names, images, likenesses, voices, and compositions are used in AI-generated music. TechCrunch (2025-11-25)

• Character.AI Adjusts Youth Strategy: Character.AI announced it will offer interactive "Stories" to minors instead of open-ended chat features. This follows the company's October decision to block minors from using its standard chat functionality. TechCrunch (2025-11-25)

• Microsoft's Copilot Leaving WhatsApp: Microsoft announced that its AI chatbot Copilot will cease operations on WhatsApp as of January 15, in response to WhatsApp's new platform policies that prohibit general-purpose AI chatbots. TechCrunch (2025-11-25)

Market Analysis

• AI Shopping Assistants Market Heats Up: OpenAI and Perplexity have both launched AI shopping assistants, but specialized startups in the space remain confident. Founders of dedicated AI shopping tools argue that general-purpose models lack the specificity needed to deliver truly personalized shopping experiences. TechCrunch (2025-11-25)

• Nvidia Investment Scrutiny: Michael Burry, known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis, has raised concerns about Nvidia's valuation, potentially signaling caution in the AI hardware investment market. TechCrunch (2025-11-27)

PRODUCTS

Asus & Nvidia Developing High-Performance AI Desktop

ASUS ExpertCenter Pro ET900N G3 (2025-05-XX)

Asus, in collaboration with Nvidia, is developing a powerful desktop AI workstation featuring 784GB of "Coherent" memory (likely a unified memory architecture) and 20 PFLOPS of AI performance. The system will utilize Nvidia's GB300 Blackwell GPU technology. While detailed specifications remain limited, pricing is expected to approach six figures. This represents a significant push toward bringing data center-level AI computing capabilities to desktop form factors.

AI Image Generation Competition Heats Up

Based on community discussions, two notable AI image generation models are currently competing for user attention:

1. Z Image Turbo - A more accessible model that can run on mid-range hardware like Nvidia 3060 12GB GPUs, making it popular among users with more modest setups.

2. Flux 2 - A higher-end image generation model requiring more powerful hardware, but potentially offering superior quality output.

These models highlight the ongoing tension between accessibility and performance in consumer AI tools, with different segments of the market prioritizing different aspects.

TECHNOLOGY

Open Source Projects

google-gemini/gemini-cli

An open-source AI agent that brings Gemini's capabilities directly to your terminal. Built with TypeScript, it features comprehensive hooks integration and OpenTelemetry for response monitoring. With over 84,900 stars and active development, it's becoming a standard tool for CLI-based AI interactions.

firecrawl/firecrawl

A Web Data API designed specifically for AI applications that transforms websites into LLM-ready markdown or structured data. Written in TypeScript, this project has gained significant traction with nearly 69,000 stars. Recent updates include UUID7 implementation and request metrics extraction, making it a powerful tool for web data processing.

pathwaycom/llm-app

Ready-to-run cloud templates for RAG, AI pipelines, and enterprise search with live data integration. This Docker-friendly solution keeps data in sync with various sources including Sharepoint, Google Drive, S3, and PostgreSQL. With over 47,600 stars, it's being actively refactored to improve template organization.

Models & Datasets

Text-to-Image Models

• Tongyi-MAI/Z-Image-Turbo - A high-performance text-to-image model from Alibaba's Tongyi team, gaining popularity with 793 likes and over 2,000 downloads. The model has a corresponding demo space with 334 likes.

• black-forest-labs/FLUX.2-dev - A versatile image generation and editing model with impressive adoption (646 likes, 115,000+ downloads). It implements a custom FLUX2Pipeline in Diffusers for both image generation and editing tasks.

Multimodal & Specialized Models

• facebook/sam3 - Meta's latest Segment Anything model with video capabilities, demonstrating strong community interest (739 likes, 181,000+ downloads). The model is accompanied by a 3D body dataset.

• tencent/HunyuanOCR - Tencent's OCR model built on their Hunyuan architecture, specializing in image-text-to-text conversion with multilingual support (Chinese and English). It has accumulated 461 likes and nearly 25,000 downloads.

• deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-Math-V2 - An advanced mathematical reasoning model from DeepSeek, available under Apache-2.0 license with FP8 quantization support. With 279 likes, it's optimized for mathematical problem-solving.

Datasets

• nvidia/PhysicalAI-Autonomous-Vehicles - A highly popular dataset for autonomous vehicle development from NVIDIA with 411 likes and over 135,000 downloads.

• ytz20/LMSYS-Chat-GPT-5-Chat-Response - A collection of GPT-5 responses from LMSYS chat interactions, available in multiple formats including Parquet. The dataset is associated with a research paper (arxiv:2511.10643).

• nex-agi/agent-sft - A bilingual (Chinese/English) dataset designed for agent supervised fine-tuning with 54 likes and growing adoption.

• opendatalab/AICC - A massive multilingual web corpus (between 1-10B samples) extracted from Common Crawl, formatted as Parquet files with HTML and Markdown parsing. Referenced in arxiv:2511.16397.

Developer Tools & Spaces

Training Resources

• HuggingFaceTB/smol-training-playbook - A comprehensive guide for training smaller models, presented as an interactive research paper. With 2,455 likes, it provides practical methods and visualizations for efficient model training.

Image Editing & Generation

• prithivMLmods/Qwen-Image-Edit-2509-LoRAs-Fast - A fast implementation of Qwen Image Edit with LoRA support, gaining traction with 209 likes.

• Wan-AI/Wan2.2-Animate - An animation tool built on Wan AI's 2.2 version, extremely popular with 2,564 likes.

• tori29umai/Qwen-Image-2509-MultipleAngles - A specialized implementation of Qwen Image focusing on generating multiple viewing angles, with 514 likes.

Experimental Applications

• burtenshaw/karpathy-llm-council - An implementation of Andrej Karpathy's LLM council concept, garnering 56 likes as a demonstration of multi-agent systems.

• dlouapre/eiffel-tower-llama - A creative visualization combining the Eiffel Tower and Llama architecture, presented as a research article format.

RESEARCH

Paper of the Day

A Systematic Study of Model Merging Techniques in Large Language Models (2025-11-26)

Authors: Oğuz Kağan Hitit, Leander Girrbach, Zeynep Akata

Institution: University of Tübingen

This paper stands out for conducting the first large-scale systematic evaluation of model merging techniques specifically for LLMs. The significance lies in its comprehensive comparison of six state-of-the-art merging methods across multiple LLM architectures and fine-tuning scenarios, providing practical insights for the growing field of model merging.

The researchers found that model merging is a viable approach for LLMs, with all methods producing functional models and some even outperforming their parent models. They demonstrate that merging can lead to emergent capabilities and good performance scaling with larger model sizes, while identifying when different merging strategies are most effective. These findings provide valuable guidance for practitioners looking to combine multiple fine-tuned LLMs efficiently without additional training.

Notable Research

ToolOrchestra: Elevating Intelligence via Efficient Model and Tool Orchestration (2025-11-26)

Authors: Hongjin Su, Shizhe Diao, Ximing Lu, et al.

The researchers introduce a novel framework that orchestrates multiple LLMs and specialized tools together, dynamically routing tasks to the most suitable model or tool based on their respective capabilities, significantly improving performance while reducing computational cost compared to using a single large model.

MADRA: Multi-Agent Debate for Risk-Aware Embodied Planning (2025-11-26)

Authors: Junjian Wang, Lidan Zhao, Xi Sheryl Zhang

This paper presents a training-free framework that leverages multi-agent debate to assess safety risks in embodied AI planning, demonstrating superior performance in identifying dangerous instructions compared to single-agent approaches without the computational overhead of preference alignment training.

Tool-RoCo: An Agent-as-Tool Self-organization Large Language Model Benchmark in Multi-robot Cooperation (2025-11-26)

Authors: Ke Zhang, Xiaoning Zhao, Ce Zheng, et al.

The authors introduce a novel benchmark for evaluating LLMs in long-term multi-agent cooperation scenarios, treating other agents as tools and emphasizing autonomous agent self-organization rather than predefined orchestration patterns commonly used in current multi-agent LLM research.

Revisiting Generalization Across Difficulty Levels: It's Not So Easy (2025-11-26)

Authors: Yeganeh Kordi, Nihal V. Nayak, Max Zuo, et al.

This research systematically evaluates how well LLMs generalize across different task difficulties, finding that models tend to generalize better to examples with similar difficulty levels to their training data and challenging the common assumption that training on harder examples leads to better overall performance.

LOOKING AHEAD

As 2025 draws to a close, the integration of multimodal reasoning across specialized domains is reshaping AI capabilities. The recent breakthroughs in context-aware embodied AI suggest that by mid-2026, we'll see the first truly autonomous systems capable of operating in unstructured environments without human supervision. Meanwhile, the regulatory landscape is tightening, with the EU's AI Harmonization Act and similar frameworks in Asia poised to standardize deployment protocols by Q1 2026.

Watch for the emergence of "cognitive architecture networks" in early 2026 – systems that dynamically distribute computational resources between specialized and general reasoning modules based on task requirements. This approach may finally address the stubborn challenges of causal reasoning that even the most advanced Q4 2025 models still struggle with.